The study commissioned by AusRegistry and the .au Domain Administration (auDA),  is the first of its kind to assesses the true extent of the .au domain’s influence on the Australian economy.

“The key finding from the report was that the .au domain name space contributed $475 million to the Australian economy in 2011.”

“More than 4300 full-time jobs were connected to it.”

“$269 million of that, or 57 per cent, was connected to registration and hosting of .au domains, with services such as web design and infrastructure provision also contributing.”

“The Internet has clearly become the starting point for consumer research and purchasing decisions,” Deloitte Access economics director, Ric Simes, said.

“The contribution to the Australian economy of the industry administering .au is significant, particularly in terms of employment, and this will continue to grow with the ongoing shift to e-commerce.”

Despite the attraction of the cheaper and more accessible .com domain, the .au domain has experienced exponential growth in the number of registrations over the last decade, reaching a total of 2.3 million in 2011 for a 600 per cent increase from 2002.

“.The report found that the .au name space is a labour-intensive industry, with 58 per cent of the $475 million contributed to the economy being attributed to employees.”

You can read the whole story here.

 …

It’s a complicated case but to the extent any of you have any .in domain names you should really read the opinion.

.In have become somewhat popular as a Hack outside of India.

Also you should keep in mind that many ccTLD’s are governed by different rules than TLD’s and this is a prime example.

The take big take away from the case is that if you park a domain and offer it for sale (not necessary to the TM owner) your registration is in bad faith under the .In rules.

Basically .In has a UDRP like system but it has some differences which the Court explains in its opinion.

The basic facts of the case is that someone has a trademark on the term Internet bought the equivalent of a UDRP on the domain against the domain holder who has parked the domain and offered it for sale on Sedo.com

The Arbitrator based off the trademark held that the domain should be cancelled and held at the registry level, not given to the trademark holder or the domain holder and the High Court agreed.

Here are the edited facts and findings of the Court

“”The dispute regarding the domain name ‘internet.in’

Respondent Mr. Jagdish Purohit filed a complaint before the .IN Registry of NIXI on 31st January 2003, under Para 4 of the .IN Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (‘INDRP’) to the effect that the domain name ‘internet.in’ registered by the Petitioner, Mr. Stephen Koenig, was identical and confusingly similar to the registered trade mark ‘internet’ of Respondent No. 2; that the Petitioner had no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the said domain name and that the Petitioner’s domain name had been registered or was being used in bad faith.

The learned Arbitrator passed the impugned Award on 5th July 2006 in which inter alia he concluded that the domain name ‘internet.in’ should be struck off and confiscated and kept by the .IN Registry.

He rejected the prayer of Respondent No.2 that the domain name should be transferred to him.

‘internet’ is a now common word. It also acknowledges that to access a ‘site’ on the internet, the user usually has to key in an IP address.…

“In all Twelve single-letter domains, including x.co.uk and 0.co.uk, fetched an average of £39,000 each in an auction run by Nominet, which administers the UK’s internet infrastructure.”

“Including two-letter domains, 2,831 web addresses were sold, raising £3m for the Nominet (roughly $4.6 Million)

“Notable buyers include Facebook, which bought fb.co.uk, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, snapping up hr.co.uk, H&M buying hm.co.uk and Mercedes-Benz purchasing mb.co.uk.

But in the highest-priced auction, Google was outbid for the rights to g.co.uk by Any-Web, a company which collects, builds and resells domain names and is believed to be the auction’s biggest spender.”

“Any-Web paid a high five-digit figure for g.co.uk, one of more than 170 domains the company acquired for a total investment of almost £500,000, which also acquired VC.co.uk and PE.co.uk.

“”Other individuals and companies each acquiring multiple domains include XYZ Invest LLC, which acquired no.co.uk; Registration Transfers Limited, buyer of gm.co.uk; and Domain Developers Fund, which bought pr.co.uk. ”

According to the story some of the domain has already traded, some several times.

“The registrar of x.co.uk, for example, has changed hands three times in the past week and is currently owned by Kiss Ltd of Mayfair.”

Interesting that Google would spend reported 7 figures for g.co but wouldn’t spend 6 figures for a much longer established g.co.uk.

$60k on average is not a bad price for a single character .co.uk,  compared to the current asking price of a single letter .co which is said to be $1.5M

Please read the FT.com story for more info.

 …

According the telegraph.co.uk, Nominet, the not-for-profit company that controls the registry of “dot uk” domain names, held a meeting in London on Monday, with authorities including the Metropolitan Police and the Serious and Organized Crime Agency which both lobbied for a new system that would allow them to suspend “dot uk” domain names to tackle online crime.

At the meeting Nominet said they have already shut down more than 3,000 websites in cooperation with investigators.

While Nominet says that “most of the domain names suspended so far were accused of involvement in selling counterfeit goods”…. “authorities are lobbying against limits on the types of allegations they could make to trigger domain name suspension.”

“Law enforcement authorities indicated resistance to the creation of a fixed category of offenses since it could limit responses to newly developing e-crime.”

Of course in London like in the US civil liberty groups and other worry about law enforcement abusing  such powers and as an example the Telegraph tells the story of the Fitwatch, a website offering advice to student protesters which was removed from the web by Metropolitan  Police Central e-Crime Unit.

Here back in the states 80,000 sites were temporary seized as child porn domains.

In the Press release EURid said:

“Today we celebrate .eu’s public launch five years ago. Steady growth since then has reinforced .eu’s position as one of the world’s ten largest top-level domains,” said Marc Van Wesemael, General Manager of EURid. “This proves that .eu gives companies an effective means to present themselves online as open for business across Europe.”

“Five years on and going strong”

“EURid celebrated .eu’s fifth anniversary at the European Parliament in Strasbourg with a birthday cake cutting ceremony yesterday.”

TechCrunch appearently didn’t get a piece of the cake saying in its post today:

“Is it really an achievement worth crowing about? I beg to differ.”

“Let’s look at the raw numbers, shall we?”

“Less than 3.4 million .eu domain names have been registered to date. To put that in perspective, half of those (that would be 1.7 million) were registered in April 2006, the first month of availability. That means it effectively took five years for the number of domain names that were secured within the first month of availability to double. Five. Years.”

“How many companies do you know that actively advertise their .eu domain name rather than the .com or the local country domain? How many times have you thought of a good domain name and immediately thought to yourself: I need to get the .eu domain name, pronto.”

You can read the rest of the TechCrunch Story here.…

Yes on April’s Fools Day.

No joke.

I guess its poetic justice that the ccTLD for arguably the most rouge nation on earth didn’t even know any better than to open up its extension on April’s Fools Day

I didn’t write about it yesterday because I knew everyone would think it was a April’s Fools Day Joke.

But the extension, which is the country code for the Republic Somalia, did in fact go live for General Registrations yesterday.

According to one domainer who participated in the Land Rush for the .So registry said they got the domains, books.so for $51 and Pirates.So for $10.

The fact that the registry even made the domain name Pirates.so available is quite a sad statement as to how little the registry knows about domain names and the domain business.

How many .So domains did we register?

Zero

Zip

None

.So there should be plenty of good domains left.

Here are some of the details:

“The policy for the TLD .SO is liberal, there are no restrictions concerning the registrants, no local presence service is needed. The registration period for domains registered during General Availability has to be at least one year and maximum ten years. .SO domain names must be made up of a minimum of 3 characters and a maximum of 63 characters (excluding the extension). Only the Latin alphabet letters a-z, digits, and hyphens will be accepted.”

“Domain names beginning or ending with hyphens, as well as domain names with hyphens on the third and fourth position are prohibited. Technical operator of .SO is the Japanese company GMO Registry, for the operative tasks the Somali SO registry is responsible. The “sponsoring organization” of the TLD is the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications of Somalia.”

As the CEO of Key Systems Alexander Siffrin proclaimed yesterday:

“Many memorable .SO domain names are still available”

That maybe the understatement of the year.

DomainMonster.com is charging $24.99 per year for a .So registration.

Name.com is charging $23.99 for a .So registration.

As an extra added bonus it does not seem that the registry whois is working properly.

 …

You have to admit with Libya  in turmoil, and with the Government cutting off Internet service inside the country you have to be somewhat brave to spend $14K on a .Ly domain.

Of course months ago Syria also warned that such short domain names might be taken by the state at some future date.

If you feel like you missed the boat on 3.ly don’t worry,  the auction for d.ly is still going on Sedo and with over 14 hours to go bidding is just at $1,750.…

Yes I know a LOT of you are getting tired of stories about new gTLD’s and .Co but this is what the mainstream press is covering and covering hard, so on to the stories

The New York Times article entitled “For Countries That Own Shorter Web Site Suffixes, Extra Cash From Abroad” talks about some of the new ccTLD’s.that always seem to be in the news, Yes .Co, and .Me.

Interesting the The article sites Facebooks recent acquisition of FB.Me but not of FB.com.

“Logging on to Facebook? You can use the social networking site’s full Web address, or you can type www.fb.me.”

The most interesting part of the story for me is about the financial relationship between the .Co registry and the Colombian government.

I know there has been a lot of interest in what the government gets out of all these .Co registrations and now we know as the article quoted Juan Calle CEO of the .Co registry:

“Colombia, for example, gets 25% of the revenue from sales of the “.co” name under its deal with .CO Internet.”

We also now know how much money is being generated by the .Co registry and its impressive:

“Last year, the company generated a total of $20 million from the sale of “.co” domains; this year, that is expected to rise to more than $30 million, Mr. Calle said.”

Finally there has been a lot of conjuncture of how many .Co registrations there will be over the next few years and today Mr. Calle made a bold prediction:

“The company predicts that the total number of “.co” registrations will rise to five million within five years.”

5 Million in 5 Years?

Strong.

The Washington Post Story story entitled; “Rush is on for custom domain name suffixes”

Talked about the new gTLD program saying:

The trusty .com domain,  is about to face vast new competition that will dramatically transform the Web as we know it. New Web sites, with more subject-specific, sometimes controversial suffixes, will soon populate the online galaxy, such as .eco, .love, .god, .sport, .gay or .kurd.”

“This massive expansion to the Internet’s domain name system will either make the Web more intuitive or create more cluttered, maddening experiences. No one knows yet.…

The domain name Deals.com.au sold for $100,000 according to the dailytelegraph.com.au to a Company Zoupon which is  the “fifth or sixth largest” group buying website in Australia claiming  around 400,000 members including our Facebook fans and Twitter followers.

“”By purchasing deals.com.au, the company hopes “to get the word out there,” he said, “about how great our offers are”. Mr Same said the group buying space was “a marketplace that’s come from nothing and is just growing and growing.”

“With us you can tell exactly how many customers are coming through the door. It’s a highly-measurable form of marketing.”

Poker.com.au sold last month for $100K as well.

In another unrelated story on .com.au domains today that appeared in  smh.com.au, big business in Australia have been doing a lot of defensive registrations grabbing  domain name which are typo’s of their brands.

A public company in the United Kingdom purchased some of the best possible insurance and financial .co.uk domain names for a total of £4.6m, rising to up to £9m depending on performance.

Based on exchange rates, this equated to a sale of around $7, 355,500 with possibly as much as over $14 Million again depending on Performance

The domain names are simply some of the best possible .co.uk domains.

Included in the sale:

Mortgages.co.uk

Investments.co.uk

CreditCards.co.uk

LifeInsurance.co.uk

HealthInsurance.co.uk

CarFinance.co.uk

Savings.co.uk

OnlineLoans.co.uk

HomeInsurance.co.uk

The buyer of the domains is Moneysupermarket.com, an the internet comparison site operator, which got them domains when they acquired Financial Services Net which main site is Financialservices.co.uk.

Moneysupermarket said the acquisition would provide “a platform for the group to broaden its brand offering to a wider range of customer segments in the money and insurance (divisions)”.

This company appears to be the Quinstreet of the UK.

Its a great acquisition and should increase the companies insurance and financial products.

Of course had these been .com domains many of these would have sold individually for more than the total high side of the acquisition of $14M.…